Running an internet scale service successfully is not an easy or cheap business to be in. Managing a set of thousands of servers running different components spreading over various data centers in order to achieve high availability, and performance is a challenging task.
One aspect that is usually overlooked or prioritized lower when it comes to the manageability of a data center is the energy cost of running the data center. With new higher-end hardware, needing more energy to run and with energy prices going up, the energy cost of running a data center is becoming a bigger part of the total cost. Indeed, power costs are rising while the cost of computing is rapidly declining, which means that power costs will soon dominate.